With continuous evolution of a wireless communication technology and standard, mobile packet services are greatly developed, and a data throughput capability of single UE is continuously improved. For example, a Long Term Evolution (LTE) system may support downlink data transmission at a maximum rate of 100 Mbps within a 20 M bandwidth, and a data transmission rate of a subsequent LTE advanced system may further be increased, and may even reach 1 Gbps.
Explosive growth of data services of UE gradually tensions existing network resources particularly under the condition that network layout of a new-generation communication technology (such as 3rd-Generation (3G) and LTE) may not be widely implemented, which consequently causes incapability in meeting requirements of users on rate and traffic and poorer user experiences. How to prevent and change such a condition is a problem that an operator must consider, and on one hand, it is necessary to accelerate popularization of a new technology and network deployment; and on the other hand, it is expected that an existing network and technology may be enhanced to fulfil the aim of rapidly improving network performance. As everyone knows, except a wireless network technology provided by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) which has been widely applied at present, particularly an IEEE802.11-standard-based WLAN, has been widely applied to hotspot access coverage in homes, enterprises and even the Internet. Wherein a technical specification proposed by the Wireless Fidelity (WIFI) Alliance is most widely applied, so that a WIFI network usually equals to the IEEE802.11-standard-based WLAN in practice, and under the condition of no confusions, a WIFI module is adopted to describe a WLAN supporting wireless transceiver and processing module in a network node hereinafter.
On such a premise, some operating companies and enterprises have proposed to merge a WLAN and an existing 3GPP access network to implement joint transmission and fulfil the aims of offloading the existing 3GPP access network and improving network performance by virtue of the WLAN. A related protocol for interworking of the 3GPP access network and the WLAN has been formulated at present. FIG. 1 is an architecture diagram of an interworking protocol in a related art. As shown in FIG. 1, in an interworking WLAN architecture of the 3GPP, it is allowed that the WLAN use an Authentication Authorization Accounting (AAA) server in the 3GPP access network for unified authentication and authorization, a packet data network gateway in the existing 3GPP access network may also be multiplexed as a packet data gateway of the WLAN, and in addition, unified accounting, charging and the like of the two networks may also be implemented to achieve loose coupling of the two networks.
However, there are also some shortcomings in a current interworking architecture, and for example, the current interworking is triggered by UE, a 3GPP network side may not control a target access network, and although a network element Access Network Discovery Support Function (ANDSF) of a core network side may give some strategic rules, these rules are relatively static and the 3GPP network side loses control over access network selection of the UE, which may cause the problem that an access network selected by the UE may not meet a requirement of the UE on Quality of Service (QoS), or may cause frequent handover of the UE between the 3GPP access network and the WLAN to influence user experiences and simultaneously increase an unnecessary network load.
Therefore, it is necessary for the 3GPP access network to participate in network selection of the UE to control to a certain extent or completely handover or offloading of the UE between the 3GPP access network and the WLAN at present. FIG. 2 is a diagram of a scenario of offloading between a 3GPP access network and a WLAN in a handover process in the related art. As shown in FIG. 2, UE is located in coverage of two cells Cell 1 and Cell 2 of the 3GPP, and in addition, there is also a WLAN called WLAN 1 deployed by an operator in the coverage of Cell 1 and Cell 2. If the UE is being handed over from Cell 1 to Cell 2, the UE is preparing to offload part of or all services to the WLAN according to a threshold or strategy provided by Cell 1, but Cell 2 may not support a function of handover or offloading between the 3GPP access network and the WLAN, or Cell 2 supporting the function has a threshold or strategy different from that of Cell 1, offloading processing performed by the UE may not work after the UE is successfully handed over to Cell 2 if the UE continues performing offloading processing according to the threshold or strategy provided by Cell 1, which may cause waste of energy of the UE as well as resource waste. If Cell 2 does not support the function of handover or offloading with the WLAN but Cell 1 does not know that, it is impossible for services which have been offloaded to the WLAN after the UE is handed over to Cell 2 to return to Cell 2, which may cause influence on user experiences.
At present, there is some equipment which supports that a base station of a 3GPP access network and an Access Point (AP) of a WLAN belong to the same station, then the base station of the 3GPP access network may acquire real-time information of the WLAN belonging to the same station, and the information may help the equipment to shorten WLAN scanning time and save energy consumption of the equipment; and a 3GPP access network which does not belong to the same station with the WLAN may usually acquire WLAN deployment under coverage through Operation and Maintenance (O&M) configuration, but the O&M configuration updating period is longer, and the real-time information of the WLAN may not be acquired, which may cause UE energy waste due to lack of interaction of network environment information.
Therefore, there exists energy and network resource waste during service operation of UE due to lack of interaction of network environment information of the UE in the related art.